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Date:      Thu, 17 May 2001 01:10:05 -1000
From:      "Randal Masutani" <randal@mailrelay.hits.net>
To:        Scott Mitchell <scott.mitchell@mail.com>, randal@mailrelay.hits.net, Dave Tweten <tweten@nas.nasa.gov>, mobile@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Xircom Watchdog Time-out Bug
Message-ID:  <3B0324ED.28683.358E3A@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <20010516222722.38753@localhost>
References:  <3AFD13D0.15883.1D4F00@localhost>; from Randal Masutani on Sat, May 12, 2001 at 10:43:28AM -1000

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On 16 May 2001, at 22:27, Scott Mitchell wrote:

> On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 10:43:28AM -1000, Randal Masutani wrote:
> > Dave,
> > 
> > I have been having the same problem on my VAIO F560 with the Xircom CE3
> > card.  I have turned on XE_DEBUG in the driver to see whats going on.  I
> > appears to have a problem with Autonegotiation.  The driver is not
> > detecting the PHY chip correctly? It tries at least 6 times before it
> > detects it and then autonegotiation works okay and then DHCP will get
> > done.
> > 
> > Anyone who understands the Autonegotiation process or more on MII PHY
> > process?
> 
> This has been the biggest issue with the xe driver for a long time now.  I
> wrote the PHY-handling code to do the same thing as the Linux driver it was 
> ported from, which seemed to match fairly well with the docs I had
> available.  However, it's always had trouble with autonegotiation in some
> configurations, although I've never worked out what the defining features
> of those configurations are :-(
> 
> I might have done more about it, except that the driver works for me on
> all-but-one of the hubs/switches I've ever plugged it into, from the cheapo 
> Linksys on my desk here to the monster racks of Cisco kit at work, and I no 
> longer have access to the one that didn't work.
> 
> So, have you tried connecting to a different autonegotiating hub/switch, if 
> you have access to such a beast?  How about inserting the card after boot,
> and manually ifconfig-ing it to force a particular media type?  Do you
> still get bad behaviour in those cases?

Yes, I have tried different hub/switches.  I always get a time-out but 
sometimes only one and at other times many.  Yes, I eventually get it to 
work most times after removing and reinserting the card.  Forcing it to a 
particular type didn't seem to work to well.

> 
> You may be right that the PHY isn't being detected correctly -- the Xircom
> docs hint at several different PHYs having been used in the CE3 and
> RealPort products, but I'm not sure there's a reliable way to tell exactly
> what you've got...

From what I gather from the debug statements it appears that it is not 
reading the PHY status (BMSR register) properly, since it is getting back 
a 0 (null) result.  Maybe there is not enough delay or wait states 
between reading or writing to the PHY registers?

I have looked at the source code and also source from the Linux driver 
and the sdk kit from Xircom, they all are a little different in the 
procedure on how to read and write data to the MII registers.


Randal


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